Trans Voices in Historical Fiction for Trans Day of Visibility

The House of Impossible Beauties highlights the 1980s Harlem ball scene in New York City, which offers a safe space for LGBTQ youth searching for family and acceptance. Angel is new to the world of drag and ball culture, but after falling for a dancer named Hector, the two decide to form the first ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit: the House of Xtravaganza.

A trans woman living in New Mexico begins writing letters to the mysterious leader of a quintessential sixties band, the Get Happies, that Gala is obsessed with. Her letters shed light on the band and the intersecting lives / identites of Gala and BB—- as the story unfolds in the present, with biographical retellings of the past.

With little else to drive him, an increasingly obsessive professor races to authenticate a eighteenth-century manuscript, possibly the only written confessions of an infamous thief named Jack Sheppard. Within its pages, the manuscript tells the story of an orphan named P, who longs to live as “Jack” instead and clashes with the newly established London police. P, who will eventually become Jack Sheppard, one of history’s most notorious thieves.

Described as part Mulan, part Song of Achilles, and often compared to The Poppy War, this historical novel with touches of fantasy reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty’s first emperor. In a time when the Mongols ruled China, a girl fated for nothingness takes up the identity of her dead brother who was said to be fated for greatness. Taking on his name, she decides to chart a new fate for herself: to take up arms against the Mongols and chase the greatness she was always meant to achieve.